VIRTUALLY NO SYSTEMATIC RESEARCH EXAMINING THE longitudinal academic careers of Canadian academics exists. Anecdotal evidence, case
studies, and cross-sectional analysis, primarily from the United States,
have long served as the measures for documenting Canadian women's
promotion through the ranks. This quantitative analysis of a unique
longitudinal data set of Canadian faculty reveals the trends in
promotion and tenure from 1984 to 1999. Contrary to deeply held beliefs,
Canadian women academics are tenured at essentially the same rate as
their male colleagues. Women are disadvantaged in promotion from
associate to full professor.

Along with salary differences, gender differences in the
probability of and time to promotion are key aspects of the status of
women in universities. Initial promotion from assistant to associate
professor is the normal prerequisite for keeping one's job at a
Canadian university and promotion to full professor is key to gaining
respect and influence in one's discipline, department, and
institution and is a requirement for appointment to senior
administrative positions and gate-keeping roles in granting agencies.
With just three major ranks, faculty members inhabit a flat hierarchy
compared with other organizations of similar scale and complexity. In
Canada and the United States, promotion to the rank of associate
professor has a time limit of six years and almost always involves
simultaneous granting of tenure and often some pay increase. Promotion,
and academic careers more generally, unfold in the dual context of
disciplines and institutions.

Increased concern about fairness and the context of detailed
bargaining between university administrations and faculty associations
or unions have resulted in highly bureaucratic tenure and promotion
procedures. Faculty members often perceive them as ambiguous and
diffuse, underscored by angst and cloaked in mystery. The folklore of
academic career advancement is fuelled by cases of unsuccessful tenure
and promotion decisions and conventional wisdom that identifies women
and racialized persons, as much more likely to be denied tenure and
promotion. (1)

Despite their prominence in the academic enterprise and the working
lives of academics, there is little systematic research on tenure and
promotion. Many studies deal with just one discipline (Booth, Burton,
and Mumford 2000; Everett, DeLoach, and Bressan 1996; Ginther 2004;
Ginther and Hayes 1999, 2003; Ginther and Kahn 2004; Kahn 1993; Long,
Allison, and McGinnis 1993; McDowell, Singell, and Ziliak 2001; National
Science Foundation 2003) or type of institution (Bronstein and
Farnsworth 1998; Johnsrud and Des Jarlais 1994; Perna 2001, 2005), or
consider only limited factors that may influence career advancement,
such as research productivity (Goyder 1992; Long 1978; Long et al. 1993)
and marital status and family responsibilities (Goulden, Mason, and
Wolfinger 2004; Mason and Goulden 2002; Perna 2005). (2)

Most studies provide only a cross-sectional view of tenure and
promotion and few are based on representative and longitudinal data (see
Perna 2001:542). We are not aware of a national study that tracks
individual career progression. Our use of longitudinal data for all
Canadian faculty gathered from administrative records has the
advantages: first, of eliminating sample selection bias, a common
problem in sample surveys of faculty, which rarely achieve response
rates above 50 percent; second, providing much larger numbers of
observations than is common in survey-based studies; and, third,
eliminating measurement errors, present to some extent in retrospective
measures from surveys.

We make use of Statistics Canada's annual survey of full-time
university faculty, which relies entirely on records obtained from every
postsecondary institution, 65 in the period that we cover. Our
longitudinal analysis involved linking the records from 1984 to 1999, a
time when university employment of women was growing, somewhat spurred
by provincial and federal employment equity programs as well as some
programs negotiated through unionized faculties.

Historically, women have been excluded from the academy and
particularly from higher ranks of the professoriate. In 1960, women
constituted 11 percent of all full-time faculty at Canadian universities
and just 4 percent of full professors (Lee 1993). In the next two
decades, there was little change. Twenty years later, in the early
1980s, women still represented only 5 percent of full professors and
16.8 percent of all full-time faculty in Canada (Dagg and Thompson 1988;
Drakich et al. 1991). This disadvantage persists. In 2005/2006, 19.3
percent of full professors were women (CAUT 2008:table 2.11).

Research in a number of countries shows that women are less likely
to achieve tenure (Caplan 1993; Cooper and Stevens 2002; Drakich et al.
1991; Fuchs 1998; Stalker and Prentice 1998). At 11 Australian
universities, Allen and Castleman (2001:159) find that men are more
likely to be in tenure-track positions and more likely to be tenured.
From the 1977 to 1993 U.S. survey of doctorate recipients, Ginther and
Hayes (1999) find that women in the humanities "are 25 percent less
likely than their male counterparts to be promoted to tenure" (p.
399). Ginther (2004) finds that men are more likely to receive tenure
than women in economics, psychology, and other social sciences, except
for political science. As recently as 2004/2005, the annual report of
the American Association of University Professors states that, "For
as long as the AAUP survey has collected data on tenure status--since
the late 1970s--approximately 47 percent women on the full-time faculty
have had tenure, while 70 percent of men have" (AAUP 2005:28).

Some research is contradictory, however. At MIT, men and women
faculty in the School of Engineering hired between 1977 and 1993
achieved tenure at the same rate (DuVergne Smith and Tamer 1999) and,
eight years after receiving the PhD, women political scientists are more
likely than men to be promoted with tenure (Ginther 2004:9). Ginther
(2004) and Ginther and Hayes (2003) also find that the gender gap in
promotion to tenure has declined over time.

A consistent finding is that the percentage of women and their time
to promotion lag behind men. Using Statistics Canada's faculty
survey, Ornstein, Stewart, and Drakich (1998) find that men were 24.1
percent more likely than women to be full professors in 1994, though
accounting for age and length of employment reduced this difference to
14.5 percent. Studies of individual disciplines reflect similar
patterns. For example, reporting on Stanford's medical school,
Stephens (1998) found that women are underrepresented among senior
faculty and that men are more likely to be both promoted and hired
directly into senior positions. Accounting for race/ ethnicity and
citizenship, Perna (2001) found that women are 25 percent less likely to
be full professors, and in science and engineering Long finds that
"at any given career age, men are more likely to be at a higher
rank" (p. 172). Researchers have found that women who are promoted
to full professor need more time to achieve this rank (Bayer and Astin
1975; Caplan 1993; Dagg and Thompson 1988; Krefting 2003). At UCLA,
Currie and Kivelson (2000) found that women faculty were promoted more
slowly than their male peers.

Many researchers have attempted to ascribe gender differences in
tenure and promotion to individual and institutional characteristics,
disciplinary cultures, and the academic "pipeline." Others
suggest that discrimination is responsible in part for women's
differential career success. For example, Ginther and Hayes (1999),
accounting for gender differences in productivity, found that having a
child and marital status, whether a university was public or private,
and academic field only marginally reduce the observed gender
differences. Kulis, Sicotte, and Collins (2002) take "the view that
women's career advancement is compromised in feminized fields"
(p. 686).

Some have argued that differences in the distribution of women and
men over ranks are merely the result of hiring patterns that favour
men--in other words, age and cohort differences account for what appears
to be discrimination against women. This pipeline theory implies that
time alone will even out gender differences in rank. An Australian study
by Allen and Castleman (2001:161) challenges this argument in finding
that even for faculty under age 30 and accounting for length of service,
men were more likely to hold senior positions, already have tenure, and
hold a tenurable position. Kulis et al. (2002:673) find that
women's share of tenured positions in every science field falls
short of their representation in the doctoral "pool."

Observed gender differences in promotion could reflect unmeasured
differences between men and women faculty, as many of the studies cited
above do not measure productivity and other "supply side"
variables. Promotion may be most affected by research productivity (Long
et al. 1993; Rosenfeld and Jones 1987). Toutkoushian (1999) concludes
that "the majority of studies that have looked at faculty research
productivity by gender, whether using national or institution-specific
data, general or for a single discipline, have found that on average men
produce more research" (p. 689), even accounting for gender
differences in race, number of dependents, age, and field.

This still leaves the question of what effect productivity has on
promotion. Using the 1993 (U.S.) National Survey of Postsecondary
Faculty, Toutkoushian (1999) found very large gender differences in rank
controlling for research productivity, race, highest degree, experience,
institution, and academic field. Women experience greater disadvantage
in promotion to full professor and achieving tenure than in promotion to
associate professor. Without measures of productivity, Long et al.
(1993) argue that "any conclusions about the processes governing
advancement in rank at research universities are likely to be
misleading" (p. 704).

Perna (2001) finds that controlling "human capital investment,
refereed publications, and structural characteristics, women tenured
faculty at [American] 4-year institutions are 10 percent less likely
than their tenured male counterparts to hold the highest rank of full
professor" (p. 556). In Australian universities, Allen and
Castleman (2001) find some inconsistency in the research, though several
studies found that women's qualifications did not explain
women's disadvantage in the academy.

The effects of family responsibilities, children, and marital
status have been a central theme in research on tenure and promotion. In
the last several years, the topic of work-life balance has been popular
in publications directed to faculty, such as Academe and the Chronicle
of Higher Education in the United States and University Affairs in
Canada. In a study of faculty at U.S. universities in 1998, Perna
(2005:299) found that having a dependent and a partner were unrelated to
tenure and rank for women, while for men, having a dependent or partner
was associated with higher rank. Goulden et al. (2004) find that women
with families were as likely as men to obtain a tenure-track position,
but less likely to achieve tenure.

With rare exception, research employing a variety of methodologies,
in different kinds of academic institutions with different structures,
in a number of countries, and over a period of 30 years, shows that
women lag behind men in gaining tenure and promotion, particularly
promotion to full professor. Moreover, this disadvantage in tenure and
promotion cannot be fully explained by gender differences in research
productivity, family responsibilities, discipline, nor human capital.

How do these questions about academics fit into the vast
theoretical and empirical literature on gender and occupations? This
requires us to locate academics conceptually, in terms of both
"industry" and occupation. Universities are medium to large
bureaucratic organizations, in Canada almost entirely state enterprises,
but elsewhere also nonprofit and occasionally private-sector
organizations. The occupation requires a high-level educational
qualification, "flexible" work hours exceeding the norm of
full-time jobs, "professional" work with considerable autonomy
and a relatively flat, nonhierarchical authority structure. Academics
seem most to resemble physicians and lawyers, though they are not
state-certified and usually work in less hierarchical and regimented
environments; also, most academics do not have the alternative of
self-employment or working in a small partnership, and are subject to
more bureaucratic promotion processes. Academic research is like the
work of some self-employed professionals, but those professionals are
not employees of large organizations. (3)

Perhaps studies of promotion to partnership in law firms come
closest to our particular research problem. A small literature on this
issue shows considerable gender difference that cannot be explained by
differences in human capital (such as law school prestige) and is
related to a complex of characteristics of firms (such as the gender
composition of the management of their corporate clients and areas for
practice) and work performance (including billable hours and attracting
new clients) (e.g., see Beckman and Phillips 2005; Gorman 2006; Kay and
Hagan 1998).

THE CENSUS OF FACULTY

Except for Lennards' (1994) survey (akin to the American 1993
Carnegie survey), no large-scale survey of Canadian academics is in the
public domain. Aggregate results from Statistics Canada's annual
faculty survey are limited to comparisons involving gender, age, rank,
institution, discipline, and income. There is no representative,
contemporary information on academic work life, faculty attitudes toward
their institutions and the postsecondary system, or their more general
beliefs and opinions. Information on academics' ancestry and
racialization is available only from the Canadian Censuses, which do not
identify individuals' institutions or disciplines. (4)

An annual census of full-time Canadian university faculty is
conducted by Statistics Canada using files obtained directly from
university administrations. So faculty members are not surveyed
directly. Although in any one year the great majority of faculty are the
same as in the previous, the surveys are usually treated as repeated
cross-sections with no linkage of individuals across years, rather than
longitudinally. To our knowledge, this analysis is the only longitudinal
study based on linked data from the Statistics Canada faculty survey.
(5) With the cooperation of Statistics Canada, we were able to create a
unique linked file of faculty data from 1984 to 1999, in order to
examine the progress of women through the ranks of Canadian
universities. Unfortunately, we are able only to follow individuals
within an institution and cannot follow individuals who change
institutions or leave the academy.

The survey covers full-time faculty members who were employed for
12 consecutive months, and so includes persons on limited-term
contracts, who are ineligible for tenure and promotion. (6) To our
knowledge, there is no systematic data on non-full-time university
teachers, even though nearly half of undergraduate classes are taught by
part-time faculty at some institutions and there is reason to suspect
that women, not to mention members of racialized groups, are
overrepresented in this casualized work force.

Aside from a person's rank in each year, we have information
on gender, age, institution, and discipline. (7) We have no measures of
research productivity, service loads, differential opportunities to
publish, parental status, or marital status, all of which have been
shown to affect promotion. But it is hard to make the case that these
are gender-neutral controls that provide fair comparisons between women
and men.

Our data span the years 1984 to 1999, an ideal period to examine
changing times for women faculty in Canada. The mid-1980s was a time of
intense focus on the status of women and by 1985, the United Nations
Year of Women, most universities had completed or were commissioning
reports on the status of women faculty. The landmark Report of the
Commission on Equality in Employment (often the "Abella
Report," after its author) was published in 1984 and the first
federal law regulating equity in employment dates to 1986. The Federal
Contractors Program, which mandated employment equity for Canadian
postsecondary institutions with federal contracts over $200,000 in a
year, came into force in 1986. Faculty associations, particularly
unionized ones, already attuned to the employment disadvantages of their
women members, began to negotiate measures for proactive recruitment.
Moreover, the period under study is an important baseline for new
studies, as it just precedes the post-2000 wave of faculty recruitment
in Canada, three decades after the previous mid- to late-1960s hiring
peak.

Our empirical analysis addresses three questions. First, are women
disadvantaged relative to their male peers in promotion from assistant
to associate professor, either by outright denial or delay? Second, is
there is a tendency for women faculty to disproportionately leave
postsecondary institutions? And, third, how does gender affect promotion
to full professor?

ANALYZING TIME TO PROMOTION

Promotions involve the "hazard" of the two irreversible transitions, from assistant to associate professor and from associate to
full professor. The simplest approaches to this kind of data are to use
a regression model to predict the timing of transitions and discrete
time or event history models, which focus on the probability of a
transition from one "state" to another, where each available
unit of time for each person as a separate observation. Alternatively,
"structural equation models" (SEMs) or "mixed
models" can be used to estimate "growth curves" that
describe trajectories of rank over time, while capturing the effects of
gender, discipline, and other variables. Because all the predictors in
our model are constant ("time invariant"), the first and
second approaches give similar results and the greater complexity of
SEMs and mixed models has no analytical payoff. So we employ regression
to predict the length of rime until promotion.

Standard "ordinary least squares" regression is not
appropriate, however, because the outcomes (promotion in year one, in
year two, etc.) are discrete and "limited," the distributions
of transition times are right skewed, many observations that are
"right censored" because the period for which the data are
available ends before a person is promoted. Cox proportional hazard
models, which are most commonly used with data of this kind, require the
assumption that the effects of predictor variables do not change over
time, so each one can be represented by a single coefficient. Inspection
of our data showed that the effect of gender violates this assumption,
as gender has a much stronger effect on the probability of being
promoted rapidly, than on the probability of promotion in later years.
Accelerated failure rime (AFT) models, which we used instead, do not
require this assumption. (8)

AFT models look just like conventional regression where the time
until promotion is taken as the dependent variable and the regression
coefficients as estimates of the effects of the predictors on the number
of years to promotion. It is easiest to understand the model outcomes in
terms of the effect of predictors on the median time to promotion. The
median is used, rather than the mean, because the predicted times are
positively skewed, correctly matching the underlying data. (9)

DATA ANALYSIS

The Distribution of Ranks

Between 1984 and 1999, Table 1 shows, the percentage of Canadian
faculty members who are women increased steadily at each rank. Change is
much slower in the full professor category, however. Midway through the
time period, in 1992, only 9.5 percent of full professors were women,
compared with 22.0 percent of associate professors, 35.8 percent of
assistant professors, and 51.2 percent below the rank of assistant
professor (mostly "lecturers"). In the 15 years covered by
these data, women's representation increases from 5.7 percent to
14.4 percent of full professors, from 15.3 percent to 30.5 percent of
associate professors, and from 27.6 percent to 41.9 percent of assistant
professors. Below the rank of assistant professor, representation rises
from 38.5 percent to 52.9 percent. Considering the constraints on change
that result from the long careers of faculty members and that the last
year of data, 1999, is still at the very beginning of a wave of
retirements by faculty hired in the great expansion of Canadian
universities in the 1960s, these data are clear evidence of the
increasing representation of women at all ranks.

Based on the same information as the first table, Table 2 shows the
rank distribution of faculty by gender and year. The percentage of women
in the ranks below assistant professor declines from 16.0 percent in
1984 to 8.4 percent in 1999, though there remain substantially more
women than men at this rank. In 1999, only 2.8 percent of men were in
ranks below assistant professor. There was only a small decline in the
proportion of assistant professors between 1984 and 1999, from 34.4
percent to 30.0 percent for women and from 17.0 percent to 15.4 percent
for men. The percentage of women associate professors increased from
36.9 percent to 39.3 percent, compared with a decline from 38.5 percent
to 33.0 percent for men. The percentage of women full professors nearly
doubled, from 12.7 percent to 22.3 percent, compared with an increase
from 39.6 percent to 48.8 percent for men.

This is incontrovertible evidence of improvement in the status of
women in Canadian universities. Also, the number of full-time women
faculty increased substantially, from 5,299 in 1984 to 9,043 in 1999,
while the number of men fell from 28,105 to 24,480. This reflects both
the aging workforce and the promotion of women associate professors.

Analysis of Promotion from Assistant to Associate Professor

Table 3 shows the "hazard rates" for promotion from
assistant to associate professor for men and women whose year of first
appointment as an assistant professor is 1984 or later. (10) The table
also shows the two sources of "censoring" that result in the
loss of data: some faculty members leave the university before being
promoted; and our data end in 1999. A faculty member who first appears
in our data in 1995, for example, will only be seen as promoted between
1996 and 1999. The first four columns of the table show all the possible
outcomes in each year: promotion to associate professor, non-promotion,
leaving the university without having been promoted, and truncation of
data in 1999. In the 15 years of data, the table describes 11,692 unique
male and 6,577 unique female assistant professors.

[GRAPHIC 1 OMITTED]

The first column of the table shows that the rates of promotion are
similar for women and men and Chart 1 shows they rise to a high peak and
gradual decrease. The hazard rates are very low in the first three years
of exposure when, respectively, 2.3 percent, 6.7 percent, and 11.6
percent of the still eligible (i.e., previously unpromoted) men are
promoted, and 1.5 percent, 5.2 percent, and 8.9 percent of women. In the
fourth year, just over one-fifth of the eligible male faculty members
and one-sixth of female faculty members are promoted; and then the rates
rise to over 30 percent in years 5 and 6, which is the
"normal" time of promotion for Canadian faculty who are
appointed as assistant professors with no previous full-time
appointment. In year 6, for example, the probability that a previously
unpromoted man will be promoted is 38.1 percent, compared with 32.6
percent for women. After year 7, which is past the point of
"normal" promotion, the hazard rate remains very high, between
20 percent and 25 percent, at least until year 14. Failure to achieve
early or "normal" promotion is thus not a permanent condition.

[GRAPHIC 2 OMITTED]

Table 3 shows that men are more likely to be promoted than women at
every year of experience. The gender difference is not very large, but
cumulatively it accounts for a widening gap in the total percentages of
women and men promoted until about year 7; after that the difference in
overall promotion rates narrows, as the proportion of women and men who
have been promoted starts to approach 100 percent. After two years of
employment, men are about 1.5 percent more likely to have been promoted;
a difference then widens to about 7 percent in years 4 through 7, and
then begins to narrow. Chart 2 shows more clearly the persistent early
advantage of men and its disappearance by about year 8 of eligibility
for promotion.

In each year, the hazard rate is computed relative only to the
surviving uncensored observations. Of course, it is possible that only a
small number of unpromoted faculty are able to stay in the university
and those denied tenure must leave and are "censored," so the
computed hazard then ignores them. This is why the results in column 3
of Table 3, which gives the hazard for leaving the university without
promotion, are so interesting. If promotion processes pose a significant
barrier to faculty continuing their appointments, we should observe an
elevated number of exits in years 6, 7, and 8, as some faculty are
promoted, some delayed for a year or two, and others terminated. By the
end of year 6, nearly three-quarters of men and 70 percent of women have
been promoted. Of those who did not leave, 87.8 percent of men and 82.8
percent of women are promoted from assistant professor to associate
professor within the first eight years following their appointment.

While we expected that denial of tenure would cause a peak in the
percentage of people dropping out of the records for a university around
the six-year mark, we find that virtually everyone who does not leave an
institution prematurely is eventually promoted. Promotion is not a
perfect proxy for tenure, but there is a strong presumption that the two
go together. The rates of departure without promotion (excluding people
for whom data run out in 1999) oscillate around about 5 percent for both
women and men, without a distinct pattern except for slightly higher
rates in the first two years of appointment, likely due to the presence
of faculty on short-term contracts at a point well before the promotion
process looms as a threat.

Compounded over many years, the hazard rate of 5 percent for
leaving the university without promotion still represents a considerable
loss of assistant professors--at least from their institutions of
initial appointment--2,951 of the 11,692 or 25.2 percent of men, and
1,607 of the 6,577 or 24.4 percent of women. We do not know how many of
these get jobs at other universities versus leaving the academy. While
the hazard rates for departure without promotion are nearly identical
for women and men, men who leave an institution are more likely to leave
in their first years of employment; 97 percent of men who leave,
compared with 83 percent of women, do so in their first seven years.

Analysis of Promotion from Associate to Full Professor

Table 4 and Chart 3 show promotions to full professor for faculty
members appointed as associate professors in 1984 or later. (11)
Promotion to full professor is slower than the initial promotion to
associate professor. The hazard rates peak at 13.6 percent for men and
11.7 percent for women, just less than one-third the peak rates for
promotion to associate professor. This must reflect the "up or
out" rule that obligates institutions to grant tenure or dismiss
junior faculty within six years of their initial appointment (though we
have just seen that it is far from perfectly applied). Chart 3 shows
that the curves for women and men showing the hazard rates for promotion
to full professor have the same shape. Rates are very low in the first
two years, trend upward rapidly to a peak in years 5 to 7 for men and
years 6 to 8 for women, and there is a gradual decline in years 8 to 19
(the final year of data), over which time the male and female rates do
not differ. In year 4, the likelihood of a man attaining promotion is
about 7 percent, rising to 12.7 percent, 13.6 percent, and 12.7 percent
in years 5, 6, and 7, and then declining somewhat to 10.4 percent in
year 8. The corresponding figures for women are 4.4 percent in year 4
and 7.8 percent, 11.7 percent, and 9.8 percent in years 5, 6, and 7, and
10.1 percent in year 8.

[GRAPHIC 3 OMITTED]

Chart 4 shows that the equalization of promotion rates of women and
men after year 8 does not remove the male advantage in the proportion
promoted built up over the first seven years of risk. It also shows
quite low rates of promotion after 14 or so years. While almost every
faculty member who does not leave becomes an associate professor, Chart
4 shows that about one-quarter of faculty members will reach retirement
age without being promoted to full professor.

Modeling Promotion to Control for Discipline and Institution

AFT models provide quantitative estimates of gender differences in
promotion that cannot be gleaned from the descriptive tables and charts,
and provide a means to measure the impact of gender on promotion when
other factors are taken into account. Especially because they affect the
norms for and define the organizational context of promotion, we need to
look at disciplines and institutions. Institutions may also have
different gender cultures and practices relating to tenure and promotion
(Drakich et al. 1991). Ina companion paper, we describe disciplinary and
institutional differences in promotion, but our more limited concern
here is to show their effects on estimates of gender differences. While
women academics could be represented disproportionately in institutions
with more lenient or more severe promotion practices, effects of the
very large gender differences in the composition of disciplines seem
more likely.

[GRAPHIC 4 OMITTED]

Our data are from 64 Canadian institutions, (12) mostly
universities, but also a small number of colleges (some with religious
affiliation), and fine arts institutions. Controls for discipline are at
two levels, 21 major disciplinary groups (13) and 141 detailed
disciplines, essentially departments. With many variables being
considered, even with a very large number of observations, it is
important to obtain confidence intervals and use significance tests for
the model parameters.

Table 5 shows the results of regressing rank on gender, year of
appointment, institution, and discipline. All the regression models
include a measure of the year of initial appointment to the rank from
which we examine promotion. While our interest is merely to
"control" for secular change, those regression coefficients
also reveal potentially interesting overtime change in promotional
practices. We find no evidence of a change in promotion probabilities
over time or a change in the difference between women and men.

AFT models yield a single coefficient for the effect of gender and
its standard error. Because the metric for the model is the logarithm of
time, exponentiating the regression coefficient yields a multiplier
giving the factor by which the time of promotion for women exceeds the
time for men (and values less than one indicate men take longer). In the
first line of the table we see that the "unadjusted" effect of
gender on time to promotion to associate professor is .0891, with a
standard error of .0092; and the corresponding multiplier (equal to
[e.sup.0891] or 1.093) indicates that women's time to promotion is
9.3 percent longer than men's. (14) With the average time to
promotion equal to about five years, the gap in time is 5.6 months. The
coefficient is 9.7 times its standard error, significant by any
standard.

Because of the complex mathematics of AFT models and the skewed
distribution of the observed times to failure, a good way to understand
the model results is to compute the expected median times to promotion,
that is the time by which half the persons at risk are expected to have
been promoted, according to the fitted model. For the first model, this
yields a median of 5.22 years for women and 4.82 years for men, a
difference of 0.40 years, or 4.8 months. This is a bit lower than the
multiplier of 9.3 percent suggests. Because the time difference involves
the predicted medians, it will not agree perfectly with the
exponentiated coefficient.

The coefficients in the top panel of Tables show that disciplinary
and institutional differences in the practices of promotion from
assistant to associate professor have little impact on the gender
difference. There is a suggestion that women experience a slight
disadvantage from their distribution among disciplines, suggesting that
promotion is faster in science and engineering than in the humanities
and social sciences. We take this up in another paper (Ornstein,
Stewart, and Drakich 2007). The AFT models demonstrate that women are
disadvantaged in promotion to associate professor, to a statistically
significant extent; though the difference in median times of about five
months is only moderately large.

Promotion to full professor exhibits a proportionately and
numerically larger gender gap, which is substantially affected by the
distribution of women among disciplines, but not by institutions. With
no controls (except for "starting" time, to account for any
secular change) women take 17.2 percent longer to become full
professors, equivalent to 16.5 months for an expected median of eight
years. Controlling for institution has no effect on this figure, but
controlling on major disciplinary divisions reduces the effect to 11.1
percent and for highly detailed categories (essentially departments) it
is further reduced to 9.1 percent. The differences in predicted median
times are 1.00 year without adjustment, 9.27 years for women and 8.27
years for men, 0.94 years controlling for major disciplinary categories,
and 0.79 years for detailed discipline. With detailed discipline held
constant, the proportional effects of gender, .0677 for promotion to
associate professor and .0872 for promotion to full professor are
somewhat different (but not significantly, z = 1.20 only). With
discipline held constant, the impact of gender on promotion to full
professor is statistically significant, and the absolute difference of
about one year, relative to the overall average of around nine years, is
certainly meaningful.

CONCLUSION

Our findings suggest that the career trajectories of men and women
in Canadian universities are converging at the junior levels, though men
have a small advantage in terms of time to first promotion. In contrast
with some previous research, we find that barriers to achieving tenure
do not place women at a significant disadvantage in Canadian
universities. Virtually all men and women who do not leave their
institution are promoted to the level of associate professor, and a
reasonable inference is that they are also granted tenure. Moreover,
there is no evidence of a peak in departures from universities in the
period five to seven years after initial appointment to assistant
professor, suggestive of persons leaving after being denied tenure.
There is essentially no difference between women and men in this
respect. There is a slightly greater tendency for men to leave a
university early in their careers, suggesting they may benefit more from
mobility between institutions; it is also possible, but seems unlikely,
that men are more likely to have a limited-term appointment. Because we
cannot trace individuals from one institution to another, however, we
cannot establish this firmly.

It is difficult to reconcile the stress and anguish attending the
process of tenure and promotion to associate professor, ingrained in the
Canadian university culture, with the evidence that it has no measurable
effect beyond the slow dribbling away of faculty before and after the
five-year point when most faculty apply for promotion and tenure. Ina
personal communication, Sandra Acker, drawing on her work on academic
women (Acker and Feuerverger 1996), suggested that the contrast between
the stress and anguish and the facts of tenure may be fear of the stigma of being one of the few who is denied tenure.

Analysis of promotion to full professor more strongly suggests
discrimination against women and the measured cost, a median delay of
one year relative to men, is meaningful, though we would not say
"large." Parity continues to elude academic women. Even taking
into account differences in year of appointment, discipline, and
institution, women associate professors are clearly less likely than
male associate professors to be promoted to full professor and, where
promoted, are promoted more slowly.

The sceptical reader will take issue with our findings on the
grounds that we have no measure of merit. Given the broad evidence that
men have more research publications, our estimates overestimate the
impact of gender; lacking such a measure, our models assume that women
and men are equally meritorious. This is the assumption of most
quantitative studies of equity. Previous research, however, gives little
reason to suppose that productivity measures will account for the
observed differences. Also, there is every reason to believe that
differences in the lives of women and men, especially relating to their
own children and other forms of family care, affect women
disproportionately and that these are not fully compensated by
universities' parental leave and related policies. We would be keen
to have data that measured research productivity, as well as aspects of
teaching and university service, in order to understand academic lives
better, but not for the edge it might give us in reducing the estimates
of the impact of gender. Better yet, we would like to have data that
trace faculty movement between institutions and information on
ethno-racial group membership.

References

Abella, Rosalie Silberman. 1984. Report of the Commission on
Equality in Employment. Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services.

Acker, Sandra and Grace Feuerverger. 1996. "Doing Good and
Feeling Bad: The Work of Women University Teachers." Cambridge
Journal of Education 26:401-22.

Allen, Margaret and Tanya Castleman. 2001. "Fighting the
Pipeline Fallacy." Pp. 15145 in Gender and the Restructured
University. Changing Management and Culture in Higher Education, edited
by Ann Brooks and Alison Mackinnon. Philadelphia: Society for Research
in Higher Education.

American Association of University Professors IAAUP). 2005.
"Inequities Persist for Women and Non-Tenure-Track Faculty: The
Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession 2004-2005."
Academe 91:19-98.

Fuchs, Stefan. 1998. "Gender Disparities in Higher Education
and Academic Careers in Germany and the United States." Policy
paper provided for the Robert Bosch Foundation Research Scholars Program
in Comparative Public Policy and Institutions American Institute for
Contemporary German Studies. Retrieved May 1, 2006.
(http://www.aicgs.org/search/
global_results.aspx?txtKeyword=fuchs&cmdSubmit=Search&cboSections= All&cboViewAmt=10&search.x=32&search.y=14).

Ginther, Donna K. 2004. "Gender Differences in Salary and
Promotion in Political Science." Paper presented at the American
Political Science Association. Retrieved May 1, 2006
(https://www.apsanet.org/imgtest/gintherAPSA.pdf).

Ornstein, Michael, Penni Stewart and Janice Drakich. 2007.
"Promotion at Canadian Universities: The Intersection of Gender,
Discipline, and Institution." The Canadian Journal of Higher
Education 37:1-25.

* This research was supported in part by a grant from the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council. We thank Ms. Heather Garrett
of York University for undertaking much of the time-consuming task of
linking and running the file and Ms. Mirka Ondack of the Institute for
Social Research at York University for consultation. We are especially
grateful for the help and advice of Mr. Dev Uppal, then at the Centre
for Education Statistics, Statistics Canada.

(1.) The perpetuation and reinforcement of "tenure
troubles" are most notable in the "Professorroman." See
Elaine Showalter (2005) and William G. Tierney (2004) for a detailed
review of the treatment of tenure in these novels on academic life. The
research on tenure and promotion and accounts of tenure denied in
publications for academics such as the Chronicle of Higher Education
entrench fear and anxiety about the tenure process.

(2.) Quantitative data on tenure and promotion are obtained from a
variety of sources, including surveys of individual disciplines (Booth
et al. 2000; McDowell et al. 2001), institutional records (Ward 2001;
Ward-Warmedinger 2000), governmental databases, such as the National
Centre for Education Statistics and the Survey of Doctorate Recipients,
assembled by the National Science Foundation in the United States,
Statistics Canada, and the Department of Education, Science and Training
in Australia, and studies by professional associations, such as the
American Association of University Professors (AAUP).

(3.) Thinking about higher status jobs is it common to pair
professionals and managers, but academics are much more like the former.
Even in government organizations, promotion of managers is much less
bureaucratic than academic promotion and it is not peer-driven. So the
comparison to professionals is much more apt.

(4.) Every five years, the Canadian Census provides information on
ethno-racial characteristics of university faculty (and everyone else),
for the one-fifth sample of the population who complete the "long
form."

(5.) Partly, this is the result of difficult access to these survey
data at Statistics Canada--there is no public use file, so most
researchers wanting to use it must do so in Ottawa. The main use of the
survey, it appears, is to produce tabulations describing the faculty for
planning and bargaining purposes, all produced as "special
tabulations" by Statistics Canada staff.

(6.) A limitation of this study is that tenure- and
non-tenure-track individuals cannot be distinguished. It can be argued
that estimates of gender differences, say, in promotion that exclude
non-tenure-track persons are subject of bias as a result. Also, in
Canada it is not uncommon for non-tenure-track persons to be
"converted" to tenure track. But, of course, it would be
better to identify these individuals. Our educated guess is that
non-tenure-track positions constituted 3 percent to 5 percent of
lecturers and assistant professors in the period under study.

(7.) We thank an anonymous reviewer for her or his suggestion that
the analysis be expanded to include the faculty member's age, but
this is not a simple matter and we have left it for further analysis.

(8.) Accelerated failure time models are parametric models whose
form varies according to the observed distribution of failure times.
Most appropriate for these promotion data is a log-logistic model, which
is characterized by a very low initial hazard rate (almost no one is
promoted after just a year or two), a rise to a sharp peak at (at about
five years for promotion to associate professor and about eight years
for promotion to full professor), then a very slow decline in the hazard
rate that does not reach zero in the maximum time covered by the data.
The analysis was conducted using the STREG in STATA. A nice discussion
of accelerated failure time regression and its implementation in STATA
may be found in StataCorp (2005:224ff).

(9.) It is not quite true that the median times are a simple, more
concrete reflection of the coefficients from the accelerated failure
time model. While negative coefficients correspond to shorter median
promotion times and positive coefficients to longer times, the
coefficients and medians are only approximately in the same order. This
is because the AFT model does not actually fit medians, bur rather is a
maximum likelihood procedure. Inspection of the medians shows they are
not misleading, but it should be understood that they are estimated with
error.

(10.) The data include a variable giving year at which the person
was first appointed to her or his rank. So the 1984 data include
assistant professors, for example, who are said to have been appointed
to that rank in 1981. Using observations with appointments before 1984,
however, would have introduced bias due to censoring of persons who were
assistant professors before 1984 and left their university before the
first observation point. Even for the persons in the first year of the
data, 1984, there was a concern about the impact of censoring for
persons appointed before that date. For that reason, the analysis of
promotion from assistant professor is based only on respondents whose
first appearance is 1984 or later. Clearly it is not possible to study
the promotion of persons who first appeared in the last year of the
study, 1999.

(11.) In this table, the sample is based on persons present in
1984, whose year of appointment to the rank of associate professor was
1980 or later. Because almost all associate professors have tenure,
there is less risk of bias due to censoring of observations for persons
leaving the university after one to four years.

(12.) Some very small institutions in the Statistics Canada data
set were omitted.

(14.) The models were estimated with STATA, using lognormal errors,
because the lognormal distribution best fits the distribution of the
hazards, which is quite low at first (in years 1 to 3), rises rapidly to
a peak (years 4 to 7 or 8), then declines gradually (from about year 9
on).